Exploiting Disorder: al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, International Crisis Group

International Crisis Group: The International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization, with some 120 staff members on five continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.

The threat of terrorism associated to “jihadist” groups in West Africa is real. Boko Haram has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) and was the world’s most deadly terrorist group in 2014. Al-Qaeda linked groups briefly took over half of Mali in 2012 and are still using that area as a base of operations to launch waves of attacks on major West African cities. The threat from IS and al-Qaeda linked groups is real. This International Crisis Group report presents a strong historical background and analysis of these two groups. It places their recent actions within the context of their greater strategies and provides an update as towards their recent capabilities. We have selected this reading because we believe the analysis based on field research and region-specific expertise of Crisis Group could improve the level of awareness of citizens in West Africa of the security threats associated to local and global terrorism, and spark public debate on policy responses.

What lessons for the countries of the WATHI Zone?

The nuanced analysis provided by this report leads to useful policy orientations for the countries of Sahel, Lake Chad Basin and West Africa, which are already directly or indirectly affected by terrorist actions. In a context of exceptional focus on terrorism globally, it is essential for policy makers and citizens of the region to think and act with caution. The following findings and recommendations deserve special attention:

Recognize that all terrorist groups are not the same. They are born out of individual and country specific conflicts and causes. Treating these organizations as monolithic blocs’ risks missing their subtleties and leading to the creation of inappropriate strategies. Further, each country also has its own cultural subtleties that can be harnessed to prevent youth from being radicalized and willing to carry out terrorist attacks.

We cannot simply kill our way out of this. If through targeted actions we further radicalize the population, then we have only succeeded in making things worse. While in this type of conflict, violent action will be necessary, it must be kept at a minimum.

Often local militaries are ill-trained, ill-equipped, and even more ill-disciplined. The local population cannot tell the difference between those who are supposed to protect them and those who are trying to hurt them. It is only with the assistance of the local population that these groups can be defeated and reform to the security services can help.

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) can be a useful approach to reduce radicalization. But it cannot be used as a Band-Aid to paper over the failure of states to fulfill their basic obligations to their citizens. We need to recognize that often there are legitimate political grievances that must be addressed for any peaceful resolution to happen. Then those grievances must be fixed.

Selected Excerpts

Excerpts below are taken from the following pages: i – iv, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 22, 24, 33

Excerpts might have been modified by WATHI, footnotes have been deleted. Please refer to the original document for quotations and academic research.

Key findings

Executive Summary

The Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda-linked groups, Boko Haram and other extremist movements are protagonists in today’s deadliest crises, complicating efforts to end them. They have exploited wars, state collapse and geopolitical upheaval in the Middle East, gained new footholds in Africa and pose an evolving threat elsewhere.

IS has reshaped the jihadist landscape: its strategy bloodier than that of al-Qaeda, from which it split in 2013; its declared caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria and grip on a Libyan coastal strip; thousands of foreigners and dozens of movements enlisted; its attacks in the Muslim world and the West. Fighting on multiple fronts – against Iran’s allies, Sunni Arab regimes and the West – it has woven together sectarian, revolutionary and anti-imperialist threads of jihadist thought.

In part obscured by IS’s rise, al-Qaeda has evolved. Its affiliates in the Maghreb, Somalia, Syria and Yemen remain potent, some stronger than ever. Some have grafted themselves onto local insurrections, displaying a degree of pragmatism, caution about killing Muslims and sensitivity to local norms.

Around the Lake Chad Basin, Boko Haram, the latest in a string of revivalist movements rooted in the marginalized political economy and structural violence of northern Nigeria, has morphed from isolated sect to regional menace, though formally joining IS has changed little about it.

The roots of this expansion defy generic description. Patterns of radicalization vary from country to country, village to village, individual to individual. Autocrats, political exclusion, flawed Western interventions, failing governance, closing avenues for peaceful political expression, the distrust of the state in neglected peripheries, traditional elites’ declining authority and the lack of opportunity for growing youth populations have all played their part. So, too, has the dwindling appeal of other ideologies, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood’s peaceful political Islam – jihadists’ main ideological competitor – diminished.

Note on terminology

The root of the word “jihad” in Arabic refers to striving in the service of God. Many Muslims find its use in the context of political violence imprecise and offensive. It reduces a complex religious concept, which over centuries has taken many, often peaceful forms, to war-making. In the view of the vast majority of Muslims, today’s “jihadists” pervert Islam’s tenets. It is hard, however, to escape the term.

First, the groups this report addresses mostly self-identify as “jihadist”; Crisis Group normally lets actors speak for and label themselves. Secondly, while jihad has long been an element of virtually all schools of Islam, a nascent “jihadist” ideology has emerged that is more than a reflection of this history. Our use of “jihadist” is not meant to add legitimacy to this interpretation or detract from efforts to promote alternative interpretations.

We mostly avoid the term “violent extremist”, given that the groups covered in this paper represent only one form of “violent extremism” – namely Sunni extremism – and section IV.D explores some of the potentially dangerous policy implications of its use. Of course, lumping together movements with diverse goals and tactics under any single label, whether “jihadist” or “violent extremist”, is to a degree unhelpful. We disaggregate between and within even the hardest-line movements throughout this report and recommend policymakers do the same. We use “terrorist” only as an adjective to describe the attempt to use violence or intimidation, especially of civilians, to achieve political goals through the manipulation of fear. Though in principle both state and non-state actors can employ terrorist tactics, we use it here for actions of the latter.

I. Introduction

An IS branch controls a 200-300km stretch of Libya’s Mediterranean coast and threatens the infrastructure for oil, the country’s main source of income. Other militants are ensconced elsewhere in its cities and towns. Jihadist groups, including al- Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), though ousted from northern Malian towns in 2012, remain at large across the Sahel and claim responsibility for recent attacks in Bamako and Ouagadougou. Boko Haram, a vicious insurgency indigenous to northern Nigeria, overran a swathe of the north east in 2013-2014 and still terrorizes a large area around Lake Chad. Al-Shabaab poses an increasing threat beyond its Somali base, particularly to Kenya.

II. A Fourth Wave

IS’s and al-Qaeda’s expansion over the past few years is the fourth in a series of waves of jihadist violence affecting mostly the Muslim world since the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan fell in 1989. The first, in the early 1990s, saw many of the foreign volunteers fighting in Afghanistan return to Algeria, the Caucasus, Egypt, Libya, Sudan and elsewhere. In some places, small cells, clustered around charismatic leaders with Afghanistan experience, launched campaigns, mostly terrorist attacks with civilian casualties, against regimes they declared un-Islamic.

From there, al-Qaeda launched a second wave targeting mostly what it called the “far enemy”. Its aim was to suck Western powers into wars in which they would be defeated, like the Soviets in Afghanistan, so withdraw support for regimes in the region, precipitating their downfall.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq fuelled a third wave, reinvigorating the jihadist movement as thousands of Muslims, many from the Gulf and North Africa, travelled to fight the Americans in the heart of the Arab world. The Awakening, a U.S.-backed tribal revolt against al-Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq that was partly motivated by the movement’s brutality, stemmed that wave. The Arab Spring protests that spread across towns and cities in 2011 then appeared to break it.

The collapse or suppression of most of those revolutions, however, has spurred a fourth wave. More powerful than its predecessors, it has seen IS- and al-Qaeda-linked groups seize territory, gain new footholds in Africa and pose a growing menace across much of the Muslim world and to the West.

The sectarianism and deep sense of Sunni victimisation that the Iraq and Syria wars and the perception of an ascendant Iran have helped spawn play into extremists’ hands. So, too, do failed governance, authoritarian backlash and the elimination of legitimate and politically viable alternatives, all of which reinforce jihadists’ denunciation of corrupt local regimes and contribute to anti-establishment sentiment across the region. Weak states with limited writ across their hinterlands or borders have proven vulnerable, particularly in Africa. Aggressive proselytising over decades of intolerant strands of Islam and the dwindling appeal of ideologies that might be used to frame resistance have helped prepared the ground.

A. Opportunity in Chaos

In Libya, too, IS and other extremist groups profited from the collapse of authority: first in the initial chaos after Muammar Qadhafi’s 2011 ouster, then, in 2014, from the escalating standoff between Tobruk- and Tripoli-aligned forces and their respective regional backers.19 In Mali, local al-Qaeda leaders, veterans of the Afghan and Algerian wars, had sheltered with tribes in the desert for years before they allied with, then usurped a Tuareg nationalist insurrection sparked largely by the return of mercenaries and weapons from Libya.20 The Taliban and al-Shabaab emerged only after decades of chaos in Afghanistan and Somalia, in both cases partly in reaction to the predation of warlords and the dwindling legitimacy of other armed groups.

Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, is something of an outlier, in that it did not emerge in an existing war zone. Rooted in the north’s structural violence and marginalized political economy, it began as an isolated sect, then a protest movement demanding less corrupt Islamic governance. Its resistance to the state hardened after quarrelling with a local governor, who, according to its then leader, Mohammed Yusuf, had broken promises made to it for help mobilising votes. Even then, though, it was the 2009 crackdown in Maiduguri, in which some 800 supporters died; Yusuf’s extrajudicial killing in police custody; an inept government response to the mounting menace; and the arrival of weapons and expertise from Libya and the Sahel that drove the movement’s mutation into the insurgency under Abubakar Shekau that plagues the Lake Chad Basin today.

C. Political and Ideological Space

Thirdly, African leaders are for the most part more united against jihadists than their Middle Eastern counterparts, even if, in some cases, no less reluctant to let power go. Their challenge lies more in the weakness of states; their limited writ in neglected peripheries; and the inability of security forces, intelligence services and other institutions to respond with the required dexterity. The precedents of Boko Haram and jihadists in Mali, the former morphing from isolated sect to violent insurgency, the latter seizing towns after lurking for years in the desert, are especially troubling. Conditions that enabled both crises – underdevelopment, distrust of the state in its hinterlands, traditional elites’ declining authority, readily-available weapons and clumsy, heavy-handed and ineffective security forces – blight many other states, in Africa and elsewhere.

III. An Evolving Landscape

B. The Expanding Caliphate?

Boko Haram’s joining IS in March 2015 appears to have been motivated partly by Shekau’s desire, after suffering territorial losses, for publicity and the legitimacy harnessing the movement to the global jihad might garner. Thus far, little has changed about the organisation’s capability, tactics or identity beyond more polished online promotion. It is not clear that operational ties to Raqqa exist. Although there are fighters from outside the Lake Chad Basin region among its ranks, foreigners are less numerous than in other African jihadist movements.

C. Al-Qaeda’s Strategic Shift?

Though expelled by French and Chadian forces from towns in northern Mali they controlled for half of 2013, AQIM militants have gained footholds in Libya, which has become a hub for jihadist networks stretching south into the Sahel, west to Tunisia and Algeria and east to the Levant battlefields. Libya’s security vacuum enabled the attack on the Amenas hydrocarbon complex in eastern Algeria in January 2013, carried out under the leadership of former AQIM commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar. In the Sahel’s fragmented militant scene, groups regularly strike alliances and splinter, but for now, Belmokhtar, who has formed a new group (al-Mourabitoun) and AQIM leader Abdelmalik Droukdel, both with Afghan-generation ties to al-Qaeda, look unlikely to switch allegiance to IS.

Recommendations

The extending reach of IS and al-Qaeda-linked groups poses thorny policy dilemmas, especially where they hold territory, but also in places facing an increased risk of terrorist attacks. World leaders ramping up their rhetoric against IS must learn from mistakes, while redoubling efforts to understand evolving dynamics.

Disaggregate not conflate: Making enemies of non-violent Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, prepared to accept political and religious pluralism and engage in politics is self-defeating. Also important is to distinguish movements seeking a place within the international order from those wanting to upend it. Even IS, its local branches and al-Qaeda affiliates, despite belonging to the latter category, are not monolithic. They have dedicated cores with transnational goals, but rank-and-files with diverse, mostly local motives whose loyalty can shift, and perhaps be shifted, with changing conditions. Governments should disaggregate even radical movements with an eye to ending violence, not lump others in with them looking for a fight.

Contain if no better option exists: Foreign powers should always have a viable plan for what comes next if they undertake to oust militants; the same applies to governments in their hinterlands. Today’s strategy in Iraq – razing towns to defeat IS in the hope Sunni leaders in Baghdad can regain lost legitimacy through reconstruction – is unlikely either to meet Sunnis’ grievances or create conditions in which they can forge a new political identity. In Libya, a heavy bombardment or deployment of Western troops against IS without a wider political settlement would be a mistake, likely to deepen the chaos. In both cases, slowing military operations also carries grave risks but, without a workable alternative, is the safer option – for those contemplating going in and those in areas affected alike.

Use force more judiciously: Although force usually must be part of the response, governments have been too quick to go to war. Movements with roots in communities, tapping genuine grievances and sometimes with foreign backing are hard to extirpate, however unappealing their ideology. Wars in Somalia and Afghanistan show the shortfalls of defining enemies as terrorists or violent extremists and of combining efforts to build centralised state institutions with military action against them absent a wider political strategy that includes reconciliation. Nor can Russia’s scorched-earth approach in Chechnya – even leaving aside the human cost – be replicated in areas affected today, given porous borders, collapsed states and proxy warfare.

Respect rules: Too often military action against extremists helps them recruit or leaves communities caught between their harsh rule and indiscriminate operations against them. Jihadists’ ability to offer protection against predation by regimes, other militias or foreign powers is among their greatest assets, usually more central to their success than ideology. While often guilty of atrocities, they fight in conflicts in which all sides violate international humanitarian law. Recovering the rulebook must be a priority.

Curb targeted killings: Drone strikes can, in places, hinder groups’ operations and ability to hit Western interests and their leaders’ movements. But they feed resentment against local governments and the West. Movements weather the deaths of leaders, and the replacements that emerge are often harder-line. Foreseeing the impact of killings is hard in a reasonably stable order; doing so amid urban warfare and jihadist infighting – with al-Qaeda and others confronting IS – is impossible. Even leaving aside questions of secrecy, legality and accountability, targeted killings will not end the wars jihadists fight in or decisively weaken most movements.

Open lines of communication: Notwithstanding the difficulties, governments should be more willing to talk, even with radicals. Opportunities to engage in ways that might have de-escalated violence – with some Taliban and al-Shabaab leaders, Boko Haram and Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, for example – have been lost. The decision whether a group is irreconcilable rests with its leaders, not governments. Although policymakers can entertain no illusions about the nature of the IS and al-Qaeda top commands, opportunities to open unofficial, discreet lines of communication, through community leaders, non-state mediators or others, are usually worth pursuing, particularly on issues of humanitarian concern, where there may be shared interest.

Narrow the “countering violent extremism” (CVE) agenda: As a corrective to post-9/11 securitised policies, the CVE agenda, pioneered mostly by development actors, is valuable; so, too, are recognising the underlying conditions that can, in places, enable extremists’ recruitment and shifting funds from military spending to development aid. But re-hatting as CVE activities to address “root causes”, particularly those related to states’ basic obligations to citizens – like education, employment or services to marginalised communities – may prove short-sighted. Casting “violent extremism”, a term often ill-defined and open to misuse, as a main threat to stability risks downplaying other sources of fragility, delegitimising political grievances and stigmatising communities as potential extremists. Governments and donors must think carefully what to label CVE, further research paths of radicalisation and consult widely across the spectrum of those most affected.

Invest in conflict prevention: IS’s and al-Qaeda’s recent expansion injects new urgency into prevention, both during crises, to halt their radicalisation, and upstream. Any further breakdown in the belt running from West Africa to South Asia is likely to attract an extremist element – whether these movements provoke crises themselves or, more likely, profit from their escalation. Although generic prescriptions are of limited value, nudging leaders toward more inclusive and representative politics, addressing communities’ grievances and measured responses to terrorist attacks usually make sense. Overall, in other words, preventing crises will do more to contain violent extremists than countering violent extremism will do to prevent crises.